bloodfist said:
Well maybe backup was the wrong term to use. I don't really do anything that would require the abilty to recover a file from some obscure date in the past.
Presently I have 2 external firewire drives that I use for "backup" purposes. Any file that I would like to keep indefinetly I copy to the external drives. If I find that I want the file again, I just plug in the drive and copy it back to my machine. This was when my PowerBook was my main machine and hard drive space was limited.
Now with this 250GB drive in the PowerMac, space isn't really a concern anymore. There is no need to copy files to an external drive for long term storage. This is where the RAID mirror would come in. With a mirror I essentially have a "backup" of everything on another drive. If one drive fails, my data is intact on the other drive. I am not too sure if I could boot off of one drive alone while the other is in the process of being replaced, I'll have to read some more about it.
My main question is do I just put another drive in (I can get the exact same model from newegg) and set up the RAID in disk utility or do I have to reinstall OS X to set this up?
Hopefully this clears up any confusion I may have caused.
Hi...
I run in a similar environment but with a RAID, and it's not my first...
A RAID 1 (mirrored) has only one purpose: it's to keep a "hot" copy of the system and data online in the advent of a hard drive failure in a mission-critical system. Any other use is just a waste of disk space since both copies change in real time whether because you updated or from an error, so you can easily get duplicate bad data instead of the back-up you planned.
With the current failure rate on hard drives, the likelyhood that you'll actually lose a drive instantaneously is pretty darned low.
I run a RAID 0 for two reasons: speed and to get a very large monolithic storage area (I do video...). I have an FW "back-up box" that I bring on line periodically to back up critical data. If I was more worried about data loss, I'd be using a utility that did timed back-ups to the external drive.
BTW, my System and Apps are on a 250GB drive separate from the RAID.
If you're absolutely committed to doing a mirror, you'll need two additional drives, a SATA controller card, and a mounting scheme (I use a SwiftData RAID rack), so $500-600 should get it done for a 250GB mirror. OS X doesn't support booting from a RAID. It may be possible using SoftRAID, but that's another $150 and a learning curve.
Or, you could buy a 400GB drive for about half that and back it with your existing FW drives.